Codename: Tommy
by Sophia Hawkins
Summary: AU. The truth was Immortals *could* and *did* have children, but the truth was so horrible, there was a reason everyone was led to believe it didn't happen.
1. Chapter 1

Codename: Tommy

Paris is too full of Parisians; even the French don't like Paris. That's what he'd said when he'd first met Alexa. Was that why he'd buried her there? How funny it seemed, every time you thought you knew what you were doing, no sooner did you finish you realized you didn't have one damn idea. He buried her in Paris, he had said to keep her near to him, so what had he done as soon as she was in the ground? Hopped a plane heading back for the states, that's what. As large as Paris was he'd suddenly found that anywhere even in the vicinity of her grave was enclosing, claustrophobic, he couldn't think, he couldn't breathe, he'd had to get out of there before he lost what part of his mind he had left.

And so here he was in Seacouver again, but he hadn't gone to see MacLeod, oh no, not Joe either. He didn't let anybody who knew him know that he'd come back. He found some solace in the fact that he was out of the Paris snows now, and instead thrust directly into the Seacouver late night downpours. He was sure the temperature was no higher than 55 degrees, add the cold of the rain and the wind chill, and he was sure hypothermia could become a definite possibility if he didn't get out of the rain soon. Ah but he didn't think like that, he could think _of_ it, but he couldn't fathom getting out of the rain and going in somewhere, anywhere. He stood out in the rain and just walked through the vacant street and looked around at the buildings and the streetlamps that were the only light in the dark, and were glared in the falling rain.

So now what did he do? That was the next question, the one to which he hadn't quite figured out the answer yet. He was freezing, he could see his breath, maybe the rain wasn't any better than the snow, he couldn't tell anymore; as he clutched his coat tighter against his body it occurred to him that he had to do something. He had to go somewhere. In the midst of all the jumble going through his brain at that moment, he had one coherent thought, one person to call.

He found a payphone on a street corner, he put in a couple of coins and dialed a number that he'd been carrying around for a couple years now, he only hoped that it was still in working order and that the same person was still residing there. The phone rang once, and then twice, and on the third ring he was starting to anticipate an irritable wrong number.

"Hello?" a tired but familiar voice answered.

And for a split second Methos' mind went blank, he didn't even know what he was supposed to say. All he could get out on the first try was, "It's me."

And that was all that was needed for a positive identification.

"Methos?" there was a brief pause, "It's after 1 o' clock in the morning, what's going on?"

Methos tried to swallow his next words but they came out all the same, "Alexa died."

There was a haunting silence on the other end of the line for a few seconds as realization came over the other person. "Where are you?"

"I'm back in town," Methos answered, looking around he said, "I'm at the corner of Lexington and 5th."

"Don't move!" the other person told him, "I'll be there as soon as possible, don't do anything stupid."

Methos only nodded and hung up the phone, and went to sit down on the curb and wait. The rain never let up and he was sure he'd be half dead from the cold before anybody came for him. He rocked back and forth and looked around and never saw anybody coming or going, no people, no cars, nothing, just him sitting out in the rain. He wasn't sure how long he waited but he finally saw a blinding pair of car headlights come up, and the car stopped and he saw the driver get out and come over to him, but until the other Immortal got up close and hovered over him, Methos wasn't able to really see him. And he was sure he looked like a fine mess, sitting on the curb in the pouring down rain, but he had nothing to say in his own defense for his current appearance or behavior.

"Oh, Methos," the other man's voice contained pity, it was not obvious to hear, but Methos knew it was there all the same. He saw the hand offered to him and he took it and was helped to his feet, and as he got up it was then that he was able to fully recognize his brother, Kronos, who wrapped his arms around his brother and held him close for a moment.

"I'm sorry," Methos told him, "I couldn't think who else to call."

"It's alright," his brother replied, "Come on, I'll take you home."

Of course, Kronos meant _his_ home and Methos knew it, but it didn't matter to him. He felt his brother pull away from him, but he wasn't able to move just yet and he clung to him and momentarily buried his face in his brother's shoulder as the grief-wracked sobs he'd been able to lock away for the past few days finally tore out of him. His mind was a blur and the only thing he knew was that he wanted to hurt somebody, he wanted to break something. He'd felt the same way shortly after the burial and had broken the bones in his hands and cut them up pretty well from hitting the neighboring tombstones. And he had made a wreck of the hospital room she had been kept in, he had all but destroyed all the machinery that had been hooked up to her, and that had been while she was still alive, but since her death it had only gotten worse.

He heard his brother talking to him and he became aware that they were moving, he was walking away with him, even though he didn't remember finally being able to move. They walked to Kronos' car and Methos got in on the passenger side and was grateful to finally be out of the rain. Kronos got in beside him and got them out of there, during the drive back, Methos rested his head against the window and just about fell asleep as he remembered, and tried to think. He knew it was quicksand but he couldn't stop himself from thinking about Alexa, when she was alive, and how quickly her life had been stomped out. Whoever made the decision as to who lived and who died and when they died, Methos was convinced, couldn't have thought anymore of it other than just some cosmic cruel joke.

He wasn't sure if he'd actually fallen asleep or if he'd just been close but the next thing he knew was Kronos was shaking him awake, and as he came around he realized that he was crying again, or maybe still, maybe he hadn't stopped. Kronos helped him out of the car and kept one arm around him as if he didn't trust Methos to move alone, as if he might do something drastic if somebody wasn't with him at all times. At the moment though, Methos felt like a zombie, he couldn't think, he could hardly move, he supposed in a way he also felt like a puppet, somebody else was pulling the strings that kept him moving along because he couldn't possibly have been going anywhere of his own free will.

Kronos opened the front door and lightly pushed Methos in, he followed in behind him and shut the door and walked his brother over to the stairs leading up to the second floor. Upstairs was a small hallway, there were doors on all sides and they all looked open, but it was dark and Methos couldn't be sure. He was vaguely aware of catching something in the corner of his eye; the room behind them that they'd just passed by, he would've sworn he saw somebody sitting up in the bed and watching them, but he didn't pay any attention to it. Kronos led Methos into the main bedroom and there, because Methos was still in a state of shock of some sort and currently unable to process a full thought or to do anything for himself, Kronos undressed him. First his trench coat hit the floor, which by now must've weighed about 30 pounds for being soaked clear through, and then Kronos removed the shirt and sweater that he'd been wearing that were likewise weighted down with water.

"Come on," he heard his brother say to him, "Let's get you out of these wet clothes."

His mind still must not have been working quite right because he seemed to black out for a few minutes, he was aware for one instant of being out of his boots and his jeans and felt a cold breeze come through the room, the next thing he knew Kronos had just about wrestled him into a shirt and then Methos was aware of being pushed back onto the bed. Once again he would swear that he saw somebody standing in the doorway watching them but he paid little attention to the matter and couldn't bring himself to focus his attention on it.

Kronos crawled onto the bed beside him and when Methos tried to get up, he pushed him down again and told him to stay there. Methos was half aware of Kronos pulling the covers back and slipping in alongside him.

"Just try and go to sleep," his brother said to him, "You'll feel better in the morning."

And the truth was he was exhausted, he didn't know anymore how he'd managed to stay awake long enough to get back here. He found it a simple command to obey, he rested his head against the pillows and closed his eyes and was already half asleep as soon as he did that. He could feel Kronos beside him and he took some comfort in that presence of another person in the room with him, right beside him, he knew that he wasn't alone and for the first time in days he felt a small sense of security, that he was in safe company, that maybe he would be able to heal from this. He doubted it though, he'd lost too many people already to fully believe that, and yet…he felt an arm around his waist and he felt a body behind him and he knew that he truly wasn't alone at this moment, that was something he could take solace in, something that had been missing for the last few days.

* * *

He wasn't sure if he'd ever gone to sleep but he was sure he'd heard the rain tapping against the windows all night. When he opened his eyes again, it was still dark but through the window he could see that it was lighter outside now meaning it had to be morning. Methos didn't know what time they'd gotten there or even gone to sleep but he was sure that it was after 6 o' clock by now. He turned over in the bed and saw Kronos asleep alongside him. Kronos looked somewhat peaceful when he slept but Methos knew that it was merely an illusion, he knew that in reality his brother always looked troubled by something when he was asleep. They all wore their ages hard, and it seemed to especially become noticeable when they were asleep and let their guards down as consciousness slipped away from them for a few hours. And Methos knew that Kronos, like the rest of them, his life had not been an easy one and despite his best efforts, didn't always get easier with time either.

Nobody knew about the two of them, and even if somebody had, Methos knew that nobody would really understand how things were between them. There had been bad blood between them a thousand years ago when the Horsemen had fallen apart and the brothers had departed, and some people might think Kronos capable of holding onto a grudge for a thousand years or more. And in truth, he probably could, but he did not, the two had bumped into each other several times over the next millennium and had been able to salvage their relationship with one another. Kronos was still the first person Methos went to when he needed help or when he needed to disappear from the world for a while. He'd told Kronos in the beginning about Alexa, about his plans for the two of them. He knew that Kronos didn't approve because he could see no point in getting attached to mortals whose time was already severely limited as it was, and especially one who was already sick and dying; still, he was able to feign happiness for his brother at the time when things were up. And he guessed he'd always known that Kronos would be the first person he'd run to once Alexa had died as well, he'd just tried over the past few months not to think about it.

Methos pushed himself up on his elbows and he leaned over towards Kronos and said into his ear, even though he knew his brother was asleep and would never hear him, "Thank you, Brother."

And when Methos looked up he realized something else; twice the previous night he thought he had seen somebody else in the house with them, somebody standing in the doorway watching them last night, and there _was_ someone standing in the doorway watching them now.

Methos didn't know how old she was; she might've been 12, she might've been 14, he wouldn't guess her for any older than that. The girl had short dark hair that looked like it had been half brushed and the other half ignored entirely, she was dressed in a sleeveless blue striped shirt and blue pajama pants and looked like she had only recently woken up herself. A permanent scowl was etched onto her face and for the life of him Methos couldn't figure out what it meant; part of him took it as a sign that he was not welcome there, but the other part of him remembered last night and if she'd been watching them…he tried to remember what happened last night, Kronos had brought him up here, into the master bedroom, had taken his clothes off and had gotten into bed with him, if she'd been a witness to that he imagined they must've given her one hell of a sight to watch.

He couldn't think of what to say to her, he wasn't even sure where the hell she'd come from or what the hell she was doing there, and while he tried to think of a logical answer to that one, the girl walked over to the bed and reached out with both arms and shook Kronos until he woke up. He murmured something a couple of times before he opened his eyes but once he did, he started to sit up in the bed and looked at her through one eye.

"What time is it?" he asked.

"Six thirty," the girl answered, and Methos noted her cold, hard voice.

"Alright," Kronos said as he laid back against the pillows again, "I'll be down in a minute."

The girl touched him to get his attention and as he looked at her, she pointed at Methos and asked him, "Friend of yours?"

Kronos looked at Methos and told her, "It's alright, he's my brother."

"…Oh," the girl said before she turned on her heel and walked out of the room.

Methos felt like he'd dived right into the Twilight Zone, he looked at his brother and asked him, "Who was that?"

"That," Kronos answered as he got out of the bed, "Is a long story."

"Alright," Methos decided to try another approach, "_What_ was that?"

Kronos shook his head, "That one's no good, I have no idea where she came from."

"So what the hell is she doing here?" Methos asked, "How long has she _been_ here?"

"About three months," Kronos answered as he got dressed.

Methos did a double take when he heard that. Thousands of years ago he knew that Kronos had been married, several times, and most of the time those marriages involved children in one way or another, and he had been good with them most of the time, but still, Methos knew that something wasn't right here.

"Where'd you find her?"

"In a mental asylum," Kronos told him.

"What?!"

"It's all a long story, brother."

* * *

Once the two brothers had gotten dressed, they went downstairs and passing by the living room, Methos saw the girl lying on the couch watching TV. They went into the kitchen and once there, he resumed with the third degree, until finally Kronos told Methos if he shut up, he would explain.

"You remember a while back when I told you about that asylum over in Chicago that some people thought they were experimenting on new Immortals there?"

"Yeah?" Methos said, clearly not getting the connection.

"I went in to find out," Kronos explained, and laughed, "Mental medicine hasn't made _any_ progress in the last 100 years, they're _still_ chaining them to the walls, _still_ pumping them full of electricity and electrocuting them bit by bit. It took a while to check out the whole place and all the patients, but it turned out to be a false alarm, there are no Immortals in there."

"And the girl?" Methos asked.

"She was one of the prized experiments in there," Kronos said, "They never made any progress with her but they considered her a case worth boasting about."

Methos stepped out of the kitchen for a minute and looked in the living room, and then returned to the kitchen and asked Kronos, "How old is she?"

"No idea, closest I can figure is 13," Kronos told him, "And don't ask me _why_ she was in there, that part I never managed to find out, all I know is that she has no family, she is not on record anywhere, and when she was there, the doctors and the so called 'professionals', deemed her a deaf blind mute."

"Triple threat," Methos said sarcastically.

"Shut up," Kronos warned him, "While I was there I got to see it for myself. They ran every single test known to man on her, and nothing."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning they couldn't find out _why_ she was deaf and dumb, no known cause for any of it." He laughed again and told Methos, "You would think that for all their training, that they would've caught on, that they would've figured something out, but they didn't. I was in the room one day when the doctors were discussing the case."

And he remembered only too well; the girl was slumped to the side in a chair behind the two doctors who were talking amongst themselves, and Kronos. She never moved, she never looked, her eyes never registered that she saw anything going on around her. Kronos had only heard half of the conversation but he heard the doctors going over a list of names, of, he supposed, other patients, and when one of the doctors said the name 'Tommy', Kronos couldn't believe what he saw. For a few brief seconds, the girl pulled her head up and looked straight ahead at the doctors, and she looked at them inquisitively before resuming her slumped position and blank stare.

"That was when I knew there was nothing wrong with her," Kronos told Methos, "Not like they thought anyway, she could see, she could hear, talking though, that seemed to be her one setback."

When Methos heard that he stepped out of the kitchen and looked back in on the girl in the living room. It looked like she had fallen asleep on the couch watching TV. He returned to the kitchen and asked Kronos, "Tommy, eh?"

"Yeah," Kronos replied, "I caught the irony of that one too. But it's still the only name she reacts to, so…" he let the rest remain unsaid.

"Has she given you much trouble?" Methos asked.

"Not particularly," Kronos shook his head, "There are of course the usual things to expect."

"I'm sorry?" Methos thought he might've heard wrong.

But the look on Kronos' face made it obvious he hadn't misunderstood, Kronos looked at him grimly and told him, "Brother I do believe she could be one of ours."

And by that, Methos knew that Kronos was not referring to themselves literally, but instead he was implying that the girl in the next room was the child of an Immortal.

"Dear God," Methos inhaled quietly.

The truth was that Immortals could and _did_ have children, but the truth of the matter was so horrible, it was understandable _why_ everyone was led to believe that it didn't happen.


	2. Chapter 2

Methos looked into the living room again and saw the girl laying on the couch, she was practically asleep, she paid absolutely no attention to him whatsoever.

"Don't let her fool you, brother," Kronos warned him, "She notices everything, she just likes to pretend she doesn't."

"I had figured as much," Methos replied, "In order to fool all the doctors, _something_ of that sort would have to be going on." He turned back to Kronos and asked him, "How much does she know?"

"Well, it's been a gradual process," Kronos told him, "I'm sure she knows plenty more than she actually says, but isn't that always the case with ones like this?"

"I think so," Methos slowly nodded in agreement.

There were damn few Immortals left who were as old as they were, and unfortunately too many of the younger ones blindly bought into that storyline about Immortals having no parents, no known origin, just mysteriously wind up somewhere where a mortal could take them in and raise them as their own. And they also blindly believed that Immortals couldn't have children, oh sure, it wasn't on record anywhere; in the entire history of the Watcher chronicles there had never been one documented case of it. Of course not, that would be too easy, and too easy for any rogue Watcher to make sure something horrible happened to those children.

The truth was that Immortals were born to two parents like everybody else, and yes their parents were Immortal, not exclusively though. There were three possible ways for an Immortal child to come into the world: either they had a mortal mother and Immortal father, or a mortal father and an Immortal mother, or both parents were Immortal. It sounded very simple and uncomplicated, unfortunately it wasn't as easy as all that. Yes, Immortals had children, but nowhere _near_ as frequently as mortals did. Methos remembered more than once, Kronos sneering as he regarded mortals as the rabbits of the human race, and what was that supposed to make them? Well he could think of a few likely candidates but he never liked to dwell on the idea. Add to the fact that for some reason, older Immortals seemed to have more kids than younger ones. Apparently being young was not all it was cracked up to be, it was only once an Immortal got a few hundred years under his belt that fertility was even a possibility, or so it seemed.

The reason Immortals seemed so limited was because there were so few of them born at any one time. By his own records, Methos estimated that there were still about 10,000 Immortals in the world, and within a decade there might be 1000 pre-Immortal children born between them all. That was the good news, then you ventured into the bad. More children were born to Immortals than actually grew up to become Immortal. It was impossible to get an actual number on the odds, though if Methos had to guess, a rough estimate he'd say the number of those who grew up to be Immortals who fought and died in the name of 'the Game' were probably 1 out of every 3 children Immortals actually had. And the reason why this was was not so simple. Most of the children would never live long enough to even find out if they _were_ Immortal.

Even as old as Methos was, it was still the damnedest thing he'd ever heard about, let alone seen. And then there was the _other_ side of it; for every 100 pre-Immortal children born to Immortal parents, there was also an additional 10 'duds', that for a reason nobody could figure out, when Immortal and mortal parents mixed there was another rarity, plain mortal children born to them as well, but of these very few of them turned out alright either. But for whatever reason, the fact remained that these were overlooked most of all, in preference to looking at the bigger picture which was the answer of Immortals and where they came from.

He could still remember when the 'professionals' had actually broken through with the term 'mentally retarded' like it was a great discovery they'd stumbled upon. They weren't unveiling anything he hadn't already seen a thousand times in his own life. The world was full of these kids; whose brains would never fully develop, or that were deformed, sometimes they had bodies to match those brains, sometimes they couldn't talk, other times they were incapable of learning, every one of them had a problem and even today the experts in the field were looking for a solution to them. If the doctors felt frustrated after 20 years of failure, Methos thought, they ought to try 5,000 years of seeing children like this and knowing damn little can ever be done to improve them. He didn't know why _any_ child was born this way either, but he especially couldn't figure out why the pre-Immortal children were. Of course, thank God, they weren't _all_ like that, but tragically most of them were, all in varying degrees, and so were the mortal children born to Immortals. Some were beyond all hope, a lot of them were capable of making _some_ progress with time and continual teaching but it was only in the most recent years that anybody had had the patience and knowhow to work with them, but the 'normal' Immortals like they had all grown up to be were actually the rarest of them all.

Yes there was a pattern to it all, and even now Methos didn't know why or how it worked, but there didn't seem to be any way around it. If a child was born to an Immortal father and mortal mother, these were the worst of the worst, these were the children beyond any and all hope, better off dead as horrible as it sounded. If the mother was Immortal and the father was mortal, then they were usually only slightly 'retarded', with the right training they could grow up into functioning people, but still had to be closely monitored because their brains couldn't grasp concepts like deceitful people out to harm them, which for an Immortal was an automatic death sentence. It was only if a child had two Immortal parents that they really came out 'normal', able to walk and talk and think like anybody else deemed 'normal'. And _these_ were where they had _all_ come from, any Immortal who was alive today in the Game, both of his or her parents had been Immortal.

So, knowing what he did about that, why had he never married an Immortal? Better still, knowing this, why had he had so many mortal wives? Well, in the beginning none of them really knew how the process worked; once they did, he took precautions to make sure no wife of his ever got pregnant with his child. He preferred women who already had their own children and that part of their life was nearly over, so it wasn't much of an issue. But in regards to an Immortal wife and why he'd never had one? Well there was always the issue of trust, it was bad enough not being able to trust your mortal spouse not to try killing you in the night, but an Immortal who _knew_ how to kill you permanently, he'd made it a point to get involved with those women as little as possible, much as it pained him to lose out on having children of his own. But he knew it didn't matter much anyway, for as old as he was the odds were he'd only had about 200 kids in his own lifetime, all of them few and far between; and unfortunately damn few of them ever had a happy outcome, most of them had been left out in the wilderness for the elements to claim, as was the custom for those sorts of people hundreds and thousands of years back when nobody understood what was wrong with them and couldn't risk the time and sacrifices it would take to keep and raise them.

Of course, if he'd actually been around, he would've kept most of them despite all the risks he'd run with them. But therein laid a cruel joke on somebody's part, whose? He didn't know, nature's perhaps. For whatever reason, Immortal fathers were seldom ever around when their children were born. Chalk it up to bad luck maybe, unfortunately in more violent and less civilized times, a lot of them were killed in battle and had to disappear before the kids were born, other times their wives disappeared in the middle of the night and had the child somewhere in secret, why? Nobody ever knew, it was just something that happened, and then most of them didn't bother to return, just wandered off somewhere else to start a new life by themselves with just their child. And when it was an Immortal woman who was pregnant, she always ran when she knew the birth was near. Maybe it was an ingrained sense of survival for themselves and their children. As Immortals, you were always hunted, and if it had ever been found out by the rest of the world or even the rest of the Immortal world that you had a child…no, to let anybody else know about that was an impossibility, it couldn't be done and was never done. Luck in part was always on the mother's sides, another inexplicable piece of the puzzle, Immortal women never showed during their pregnancy. They might even be able to claim they didn't know they _were_ pregnant until the birth started, but none of them stuck around to even answer those questions.

That was why so many Immortal babies were foundlings, left somewhere for someone else to find; if there was no trace of an Immortal around, then how could anybody know that it was a pre-Immortal baby? Eventually the child was taken in by somebody, and no one was the wiser until about 20 years later when fate played another cruel joke and welcomed another unsuspecting soul into the Game. Another cruel joke that fate played on them was that the Immortal parents couldn't feel the Quickenings of their own children, that was why in the beginning nobody knew where Immortals came from, because their own parents, if they stuck around long enough, couldn't sense anything from them and thought that they'd somehow given birth to mortals, and on rare occasions they did but for the most part their children were all pre-Immortals just as they had once been. As it turned out, this was very hit and miss, it was not _solely_ the parents who couldn't feel the Quickenings, but they were without doubt and without exception, why half of the other Immortals in the world could and the other half couldn't was anybody's guess.

And here it was thousands of years later, and what he would've thought would be common knowledge by now, was only known to the oldest surviving members of the Immortal race. Try telling it to the younger ones, and do they listen? No. Just like trying to tell them that the Game is a trap and there is no Prize and all the fighting is for nothing, who would believe it? He'd tried before, never gotten anywhere, so he resigned himself to give up and let those idiotic enough to blindly go along with the 'rules' that they didn't know where they came from or how old they were, or even if there was any validity to them, fall to their own fates, which usually left them laying in a ditch somewhere without their heads.

But in the meantime the children always suffered the consequences. Even now, for no known reason why, Immortal fathers were never present when their mortal wives or girlfriends gave birth to their children. Just more of the same old joke, even today they could die publicly and have to disappear, and a lot of them did. And very few were there when their Immortal wives had theirs either. That survival instinct for both mother and child was still alive and kicking in the women Immortals and they still felt a dire need to make themselves disappear and start again somewhere. Maybe they were right, Methos thought to himself, after all mortal women were at most risk of dying while pregnant from their husbands killing them, so why couldn't Immortal women be entitled to share the same fears? They had far more at stake with their children than mortals did.

Of course even over a course of 5,000 years, nothing stayed the same, and in more recent decades, Kronos had confided in him of a new suspicion going round through those old enough to know better; finally there seemed to be some kind of mutation occurring with the children. Now, the ones born to Immortal mothers were starting to turn out closer to those with both Immortal parents, and those with Immortal fathers were starting to become the more 'slightly' cases. Oh he hoped that was true, because now he couldn't stop wondering which was the case for this child Kronos was keeping with him.

"Any idea which she is?" he finally asked.

Kronos shook his head, "No, could be any of them…could even be among the best. You know how it is with them, even with two Immortals responsible for creating them, if they're not found within a certain amount of time, then that throws everything off, everything is delayed, damaged…that could be her, or her mother could be one of us, or by this point perhaps even her bastard father could be one of us."

Gooble gobble," Methos responded.

"Whichever it is, she's been here for three months, and what she already knew and what she knows now is anybody's guess where one ends and another begins," Kronos told him.

"How…" Methos asked, "Did you get her out?"

"Oh," Kronos answered in a cynically nonchalant tone that Methos hated, "Just one of those unforeseen dilemmas, one night the asylum mysteriously broke out in a fire."

Methos tried to keep a straight face but he couldn't resist laughing, "Some things never change, 5000 years later and you're still a fire bug."

"While everybody else was scrambling to get out and take the 'progressive' patients with them, I made my way up to the floor she was being kept on and took her down the back exit," Kronos explained, "Before the night was over we were both out of Chicago."

* * *

Dead weight in his arm, that's what she felt like. He didn't know how old this kid was, but it was obvious they weren't feeding her enough in the hospital. As he opened the door and turned on the lights, he saw that she was unresponsive, she wasn't moving, she wasn't even trying, she just stayed locked in his arm's grip and her feet dangled loosely beneath her like the ringer in a bell.

Once in the kitchen, Kronos put her down and watched to see what she would do. She stood straight and looked straight ahead at the wall, never glanced at anything else in any other direction. Kronos grabbed her by the arm and jerked her around to look at him and he told her, "Alright, you can cut out the feeble tricks, they don't work on me. I knew from the moment I saw you, that you can see," he lunged at her and saw her draw back, "Hear," he snapped his fingers loudly in her ear and watched her flinched, "And I'll just bet I can make you talk."

She looked at him like a dog about to be beaten. He pointed past her and said, "Look over there." She didn't, so he put his hand on the top of her head and forced her to turn around and look, "Look over there, what do you see?"

She didn't say anything, so he picked her up by the back of her hospital gown and set her down closer to the counter, he pointed to the coffee cup and asked her again, "What is this?"

She looked at him as if she didn't know how to respond. So he picked it up and all but shoved it in her face and asked her again, "What is this?"

"C-c-cu-" it sounded like she was trying to clear a hairball from her throat, but she tried again, "Cu…cu-uuu-cu-u-up."

Well that was a start, he felt certain that already they could forget about the possibility that her father was an Immortal. He picked up a can of table salt and asked her, "What's this?"

"S-s-sssssss-aaallllt," she answered.

Kronos felt his eyebrows rise, more out of amusement than actual surprise. "Very good," he put it down and turned her to face the wall the clock was on and asked her, "What's that?"

"Cu-cl-clooooo-ck."

He spent the next half hour having her name the items around the house, with a little coercion he managed to get her to cut the sounds down to half the length she was using which was still twice as long as they actually were, but it was a start. After that he took another look at her and decided she needed to be cleaned up. So he took her into the bathroom, filled the tub with hot water, in one move he ripped her gown off and with another he picked her up and threw her into the tub. She hit the bottom hard and screamed in response to the hot water on her skin. She also screamed when he washed her, though he was nowhere near the point of scrubbing her raw, and she didn't stop screaming until he had her out of the tub and wrapped up in a towel to dry.

Mildly retarded? Might be. Or was it just possible she was kept in a captivity for so long that any normal learning development was permanently stunned? That was what he had to find out, and he knew it wouldn't be easy or quick, which was just fine with him. He'd waited 200 years to find a pre-Immortal child, he could wait a little longer to make her talk.

He let her sleep in the bed that night, she lay where she collapsed upon impact and never moved during the night. The next day he went out and got some clothes that were roughly her size so she could go outside without drawing _too_ much attention to herself. And from there, it was all trial and error. He let her explore the house and look over everything and coaxed the words out of her to describe everything she touched and looked at and picked up to assess how much she had already learned before this point. He also watched the way she carried herself and the little movements she made, more like a 5 year old than a teenager; she kept tripping over her feet, tripped on the stairs repeatedly, got her knees all banged up, for a brief period she crawled up and down the stairs. She pulled her hair frequently and instead of biting her nails she would latch her teeth onto her hand or her arm, more of a sucking sensation than actually biting herself.

Altogether, after he'd had a few days to observe her, he figured he could pinpoint her current mental capacity as being somewhere between a 1st and 2nd grader's, that was a generous estimate though. It wasn't of much matter to him, he knew that given the time and work, that the children like this _were_ capable of learning; to what extent was anybody's guess but he was going to find out, _now_ he actually had a chance to.

A well guarded secret from the old days that most people would be disemboweled before they found out was that he was a sucker for children, and apparently that hadn't changed all that much in the thousands of years that followed; until he could get the girl settled he didn't have the heart to kick her out of his bed at night. She was still having trouble grasping basic words so was at a loss to communicate, her mental buildup thus far seemed to be matched with a much younger child, one that needed frequent attention and close contact with other people; but the fact remained that she didn't know him or this place, the proverbial stranger in a strange land, so she tried keeping to herself, she curled herself into as small a ball as possible when staying on her side of the bed for the night. After a couple of weeks he managed to put her in another room of the house, but it was still a gradual process; the first few nights he'd wake up to the sudden surprise that she'd crawled back into bed with him. She didn't know him, but it was starting to become apparent, she trusted him, as odd as that may seem.

Immortals' children, despite their setbacks, could never cease to amaze. He had figured since she had so much obvious trouble in even speaking, that there couldn't be any way she could read yet. Showed what he knew. One morning he came down and found her in the living room with the morning paper; he had thought she was only looking at the pictures, but upon closer look he saw that though her mouth was closed, it was moving as if she was about to start reading the paper out loud. He'd had a lot of experience watching people over the centuries, and he'd gotten so that on many occasions he could tell what the first word somebody would say when they opened their fat mouth, just on how they moved their lips when they were still closed. But she didn't open her mouth, and no sound came out; after she discarded the paper and went into the kitchen, he found the paper and glanced over the front page story, the print matched up with the words she had been trying to say.

So clearly she _could_ read, but again, to what extent? He didn't know that either, and that unfortunately they would never know because it seemed no matter how hard anybody tried, these children could never explain as well as they could understand; even the best of the best had a fair share of problems in communicating, they often came up blank for words or selected the wrong ones to use in their speech. And it was always obvious that they knew they got it wrong because they easily became frustrated when it happened; and in time he'd gone through the exact same thing with her, more often than not though, it was for the things she couldn't say than the ones she did. These children to some degree had to have had the mental capacity to be self loathers when this happened; Tommy on more than one occasion when she couldn't get a word right would beat her hands against the wall or the table and hit herself in the head and start crying. Very quickly he learned to come up behind her and restrain her when it first started; he grabbed her around the waist and lifted her off her feet long enough to sit down and get her settled on his lap and he grabbed her by the wrists and hands so she couldn't hurt herself, and waited for her to wear herself out. Certainly nobody ever said being a parent was easy, but being parent to a child that would one day become Immortal, even a surrogate parent, that had to be among the hardest things for anybody to pull off. The damn mortals had no idea what they took for granted.

* * *

"And," Methos said, folded his arms against his chest, "For three months' time, what progress have you been able to make?"

Kronos shook his head, "Not much, as you well know it's a _very_ gradual process."

Methos nodded, he _did_ remember.

"But progress is progress regardless of how slow it is," Kronos added.

Methos nodded again, "Like when they bulldozed Chernobyl, two minutes only per day every day without exception."

"Something like that," Kronos replied.

Methos nodded towards the living room and commented, "She seems pretty normal at first glance."

Kronos nodded, "Took a while to get her even _that_ far."

"So…how's she doing now?" Methos asked.

"I'll let you decide for yourself," his brother told him.

Kronos went to the living room and called out, "Tommy, will you come in here?" A minute later the girl entered the kitchen with him. Kronos gestured to Methos and said, "This is my brother, Methos, say hello."

Tommy sheepishly raised her hand and gave a single, far spread wave.

"You can do better than that," Kronos told her, "Say 'hello'!"

"Hello," she said flatly.

He smiled at her, "Hello, Tommy, how are you?"

Tommy turned on her heel and pressed her face against the back of Kronos' jacket. His response was to give her a light elbow to the jaw and told her, "You know better than _that_."

Methos noticed the look on her face as she gazed to the floor uncertainly, and he said for her benefit, "She's just shy." When he took one step towards her, she turned and pressed herself against Kronos so hard she about knocked him down.

"That's the understatement of the century," Kronos told his brother. He added to her, "Cut that out," and slapped her away, though it was more sound than actual impact.

Methos rolled his eyes and commented, "You always _did_ have a way with children."

"Don't let yourself be fooled, this is purely for _your_ benefit," Kronos assured him, and gave Tommy a small shove towards the doorway. Tommy reached her arms out and braced herself against the doorframe, but left the kitchen, and returned a moment later with a book she was apparently reading. She opened it to a spot near the middle and read for Methos' benefit, "'Sex is a fine word, everybody got sex?'"

"Cute," Methos said in his usual tone of sarcasm.

Of course it would be too much to expect that Kronos would have any issue with it. He merely turned to the girl and told her, "Go get dressed."

Tommy nodded and left the kitchen, and this time stayed gone for several minutes. Once she was gone, Methos couldn't help commenting, "I wonder whose she is?"

"Nobody we know, that's a safe bet," Kronos remarked.

Methos nodded glumly.

Fate was a cruel joke. The mothers were driven away from their homes and their families by some internal inexplicable sense of survival for them and their children, and the Immortal mothers left their children where someone else could take them in and raise them. But such was not always the case. Feral children and pre-Immortal children often went hand in hand. Being a foundling was not all it was cracked up to be because sometimes they might not be found for a couple years depending on if someone else dumped them somewhere, if the animals got to them, if the animals accepted them as one of their own. Children who grew up among wild dogs, and lived as wild dogs, were not uncommon the world over, some were found as toddlers, some were found at 8, others weren't discovered until they were nearly teenagers, there was absolutely no rhyme or reason to any of it. Even now though, many wondered what the purpose was for those found later on; still today it was believed what children learned in their formative years was what would stick with them the rest of their lives. And when they said formative, they meant 3-4 years old tops, what then could be accomplished with a child who'd lived in the wild with no people around, for 10-11 years? Oh but, he knew the answer to that one too, and most days it was too painful for him to even remember. As an Immortal, you learned early on that fate being cruel just came with the territory, but it was always different when children were involved.


End file.
